This book is an investigation into the descriptive task of moral philosophy. By the descriptive task I mean here the challenge of providing rich and accurate pictures of the moral conditions, values, virtues, and norms, under which people live and have lived, along with relevant knowledge about the human animal or human nature. Today this kind of research is often conducted by intellectual historians, social historians, sociologists, anthropologists, or researchers in cultural studies, for example, while philosophers concentrate on normative ethical theory, the conceptual and ontological inquiries of metaethics, or questions of putting theories to work in applied ethics. And indeed, we may think this is as it should be, by definition.
According to the (current) Encyclopaedia Britannica on the web “Comparative ethics, also called Descriptive Ethics” is
the empirical (observational) study of the moral beliefs and practices of different peoples and cultures in various places and times. It aims not only to elaborate such beliefs and practices but also to understand them insofar as they are causally conditioned by social, economic, and geographic circumstances. Comparative ethics, in contrast to normative ethics, is thus the proper subject matter of the social sciences (e.g., anthropology, history, sociology, and psychology). (http://global.britannica.com/topic/comparative-ethics)
The contrasted normative ethics, in its turn, is described as
that part of moral philosophy, or ethics, concerned with criteria of what is morally right and wrong. It includes the formulation of moral rules that have direct implications for what human actions, institutions, and ways of life should be like. (http://global.britannica.com/topic/normative-ethics)
Metaethics, the constant companion of normative ethics in the field of moral philosophy, is described as follows:
I cite these entries because they state what is commonplace and yet deeply problematic: first, a habitual and institutional separation of the study of the good and right (and the “nature,” i.e., ontology, of good and right) from the study of the ways of life that condition ideas and practices concerning the good and the right. And second, a severing of the study of ways of life from the body of moral philosophy, leaving it to other disciplines or to the obscure and peripheral tracts of philosophical study that sometimes go under the name of cultural philosophy. (The search term “cultural philosophy” leads in the mentioned encyclopedia, inexplicably and only, to the late literary critic, novelist, and semiotician Umberto Eco, from which we are led to assume that this is not a common search word or important topic.) The philosopher, according to the habitual division of labor, has little to do with cultural analysis, with attempts to understand what is contingent and fleeting in his surroundings.the subdiscipline of ethics concerned with the nature of ethical theories and moral judgments.… Major metaethical theories include naturalism, nonnaturalism (or intuitionism), emotivism, and prescriptivism. (http://global.britannica.com/topic/metaethics)
Obviously some projects of descriptive ethics are left to others because philosophers lack the appropriate means to conduct various kinds of study that may add to our knowledge about human life. Experimental psychology can systematically get at empirical aspects of people’s moral responses that cannot be accessed by philosophical reason alone. Work in moral history requires sustained archival work of a kind that philosophers may be poorly trained to conduct and temperamentally disinclined to learn. Sociological research can bring out how people make sense of their moral choices, but the use of interviews is not part of the philosopher’s toolbox.
In contrast to any easy division of intellectual labor, however, I argue two things. First, that philosophical ethics cannot be pursued in meaningful ways without substantial descriptive or comparative work, which often benefits from other sciences as well as the arts. Second, that the main reason why the projects of descriptive ethics are left to others is that there is in today’s philosophical ethics too little appreciation of the philosophical import of descriptive work and the philosophical hazards involved in such work. Normative ethics is never just normative, but is based on an interpretation of our moral situation. And conversely any articulation of our situation involves covert normative emphases and implications that should awaken a philosopher’s critical instincts. Much of the polemics about initial description of our moral situations is muffled by the philosophers’ eagerness to proceed to argument and theorization. Pictures and perspectives are taken for granted, and not submitted to careful scrutiny, because making pictures and perspectives does not match the philosophers’ idea of the work of reason. Work on descriptive starting points is far from nonexistent in philosophy but it is continuously placed in the margins of philosophical ethics.
My target here is moral philosophy as pursued in the analytic tradition broadly conceived, including ethics after Wittgenstein, neo-pragmatism, and some boundary crossing work, but excluding work done within the continental traditions: phenomenology, critical theory, and existentialism. Some of the points raised here, concerning philosophy and empirical research, may be applicable to discussions in these traditions too, but to sort this out will be beyond the scope of this small book. Traditionally the continental traditions have much more lively connections to literature, social research, anthropology, and social criticism, which protects them to a certain extent from the intellectual isolation and technicalization that often besets analytic moral philosophy. Indeed, a reconnection to substantial descriptive work in moral philosophy may involve the activation of not only resources that are already there within the analytic tradition (Wittgenstein and pragmatism), but also resources that are most likely to be seen as external, like the work of Foucault. My aim, however, is not to hold up any other modern tradition as a model for analytic moral philosophy: It is rather to look for ways in which analytic moral philosophy can become more alive to real-life morality.
Thus let us begin with setting the stage. Any philosophical project on morals is dependent on a broad variety of actual or potential insights that are not received through philosophical reasoning alone. As Iris Murdoch puts it, in moral philosophy “the examination should be realistic. Human nature, as opposed to the natures of other hypothetical spiritual beings, has certain discoverable attributes, and these should be suitably considered in any discussion of morality” (Murdoch 1997, pp. 363–364).
Realism here does not indicate a metaphysical position, but the very ordinary idea that our account should not be fanciful, biased, simplified, or shaped by untenable idealizations. The crucial question is how the “discoverable attributes” of human beings and their surroundings and situations are expected (1) to be recorded and (2) to influence work in moral philosophy. Many philosophers seem to be content with reliance on a rather humdrum philosophical commonsense, upon which ethical theories and metaethics are built. In this view, a reasonable understanding of human affairs to ground moral theory is relatively easy to achieve and does not require much empirical or descriptive efforts.
The call for a realistic consideration of human attributes can also be understood as a call to extend the philosophers’ knowledge about moral life in rather specific and circumscribed ways. An example of this could be the increasing reliance on experimental psychology in moral philosophy.
But the call to “realism,” in Murdoch’s sense, can also, further, be understood as a call to consider the factual, empirical, and historical world of human morals as a source of sustained wonder and continuous inquiry. This is the starting point of a descriptive philosophical ethics: the idea that moral philosophers need to put a great deal of effort into the description of moral life and into the (broadly) empirical acquisition of different kinds of knowledge about morality, values, and human beings. As Annette Baier puts it, “We philosophers need to work with anthropologists, sociologists, sociobiologists, psychologists, to find out what actual morality is; we need to read history to find how it has changed itself, to read novels to see how it might change again” (Baier 1985, p. 224).
Baier’s call to “find out what actual morality is” should be read in the context of the late-twentieth-century “anti-theory” debate where a number of philosophers, including Baier, Bernard Williams, Peter Winch, Cora Diamond, and Charles Taylor, challenged the then current (though fairly young) paradigm of normative ethical theory, on the one hand, and metaethics, on the other. This debate was received mainly as a negative intervention, a repudiation of normative theorizing in ethics. But this is only one part of the story. The other, neglected but more important part is the call for a different kind of inquiry in ethics: one which seeks to know all kinds of things about actual moralities instead of constructing an abstract theoretical edifice. The confrontational antitheoretical posture has by now lost much of its appeal, but the descriptive and empirical appetites are thriving in various places: in the post-Wittgensteinian call for a return to “the ordinary” (Forsberg 2013), in the broad ethical interest in literature and film, in moral psychology, in experimental philosophy and pragmatist ethics.
Although modern moral philosophy, arguably, has focused its energies on other things than describing, uncovering, and inquiring into moral frameworks and practices, a present-day philosopher, inclined in this direction, finds resources for a more descriptive or empirical philosophy in the work of some of the most central philosophers of the twentieth century. I will in Chaps. 6–9 discuss how the descriptive ideal of ethics is instantiated, in different ways, by John Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, and Charles Taylor, and by thinkers inspired by them. This selection of four philosophers, in addition to providing central sources today for a descriptive philosophical ethics, has also the benefit of bringing different themes for a contemporary descriptive project into view: Dewey’s scientific and empirical emphases, Wittgenstein’s low-key descriptions of everyday (linguistic) practices, and Foucault’s and Taylor’s different genealogies of modern personhood and modern frameworks of value.
I will investigate how the ideas of these philosophers and their followers in four very different ways feed into the project of a contemporary “descriptive” and yet philosophical ethics. I will highlight how the descriptive projects are put forward by these thinkers: as paths to various knowledge about morality and also as paths to intellectual and moral self-knowledge. But before turning to these philosophers, I will in Chaps. 2–5 discuss the state of moral philosophy today: its theoretical emphases, aims, and internal mode of organization. Where mainstream analytic moral theory seeks to go “below the surface” of everyday morality by providing rational grounds and procedures for moral thought and action, the contending philosophers of the “descriptive” project seek to do the same by investigating the frameworks of value that are ours, that are at work in our supposedly most universal moral precepts, and that we nonetheless often fail to understand and account for. But when read in terms of the current division of labor in ethical study, as exemplified by the Britannica, the efforts of the latter tend to be misunderstood, either as not addressing questions of moral philosophy or as trying to do so in a way which is lacking in critical penetration.
Thus, the first part of the book describes how the field of moral philosophy today is formed: its central concerns as well as major dissenting voices. The second part, Chap. 6 onward, proceeds to reassemble the philosophical study of morality around descriptive (rather than normative and theoretical) efforts, leaning on ideas derived from four major twentieth-century philosophical figures.
My primary concern in this book is to make a place for descriptive efforts at the heart of moral philosophy, drawing on resources both internal and external to the philosophical tradition. The aim is to make moral philosophy richer and more responsive to lived morality and extra-philosophical insights about moral life. For this purpose, we need a clearer understanding of the philosophical thrust of descriptive accounts of the moral life, moral practices, and moral change, and we need to reconnect to a tradition within the tradition of moral philosophy where this work is considered essential.
But philosophy, philosophical thought, and the philosophical traditions also make an irreducible contribution to the projects of descriptive ethics. Descriptive ethics is never just descriptive: It involves, rather, a complex element of normative or evaluative struggle, as well as complex conceptual work, in which philosophers are at home and which they thus may be particularly well prepared to deal with. Moral philosophers are not just in need of descriptive efforts: They can also contribute to these efforts in distinctive ways, especially when it comes to mediating between our (sociological, anthropological, historical) observations of moral forms of life and the judgments we make in our practical moral lives. This is what philosophy could be at its best. But this role of a mediator and practical thinker cannot be credibly shouldered by academics who are ignorant and careless about existing moralities and their constitution.
Literature
Baier, Anette. 1985. Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals. London: Methuen.
Forsberg, Niklas. 2013. Language Lost and Found: On Iris Murdoch and the Limits of Philosophical Discourse. New York: Bloomsbury.
Murdoch, Iris. 1997. Existentialists and Mystics—Writings in Philosophy and Literature. London: Chatto & Windus.